Newcastle University

Introduction

This exhibition contains Special Collections holdings which relate to the border region at the end of the Eighteenth and the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. It also records the appropriation of the borders and its myths in the writings of Romantic period poets and novelists.

The Romantic Movement was partly defined by its interest in the workings of Imagination, Passion, Nature, the Beautiful, the Picturesque, and the Sublime, as constituents of a reaction against the strict rules and rational thought of the Enlightenment. Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Burns and Blake attached new values to 'primitive' culture, including the 'Border ballads'. Border ballads - short stories in verse - tell of the lives of the people in the border region, which was marked by continuous warfare.
The heroes, the feuds, the raids, continued to be sung about for centuries after the border feuds had come to an end. History and historical imagination, too, became a new focus of attention in the Romantic Period, especially after Scott began writing his immensely popular historical novels, the first of which, Waverley, was published in 1814.

The exhibition takes place in conjunction with an international conference held at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 28th-31st July 2005, on "Romanticism's Debatable Lands" (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/bars2005).
Delegates will visit the home of the Newcastle-based artist and wood-engraver Thomas Bewick, as well as Wallington Hall in Northumberland, home of the influential Trevelyan family (their papers forming a major collection at the Robinson Library).
Special Collections materials pertaining to Bewick and the Trevelyans have been included in the display.